One Man’s Journey: 1939 to 1947
by Howard W Powell
I spent most of the Second World War in a labour camp in Poland as a Prisoner of War. For years I found it very difficult to
talk about it, and I am only just coming to terms with what happened there.
I first joined the army when I was twenty-one at
the start of conscription. You spent six months in the army and then three and a half years in the Reserve, which you spent at home
but could be called up if needed. I went into the army in 1939 and the war broke out in September during my six months’ service. No-one
told me that my six months were now extended to cover the duration of the war. I just stayed in the army!
After finishing my
basic training I decided I would do anything as long as I was nowhere near the front line. So I joined the Royal Army Ordinance
Corps. I worked with the electrical and mechanical engineers repairing vehicles. We were sent to France as soon as war broke
out but our station was well back from the front at a little place called Loos-en-Gohelle near Arras where some of the First World
War battles had taken place. At first nothing was happening in France although there was a war on, so we were sitting around
with nothing to do all day except a few vehicles to repair. It was great! Right up to the following May all we did was fraternize
with the local population – a very polite way of putting it! They enjoyed having us there and we certainly enjoyed visiting!
Then
suddenly the German army simply whipped through France in about a couple of days. You woke up one morning, got your bacon and
eggs and – Whump – the Germans were there! The only information we were given was that two or three isolated German tanks had
broken through our lines. If we saw them we were ordered to fire. There we were with half the German army in front of
us, and all we had was five rounds of ammunition each. Someone at Head Quarters had obviously made a slight miscalculation.
On
the second day after we heard the news, I saw some German tanks coming down the road. So we fired our five rounds at them and
then there was nothing to do except turn around and march away in an orderly column. Of course, they soon caught us up and we
dived in the ditch at the side of the road for protection. I was at the bottom of the ditch and the last to get up, unfortunately,
still grasping my rifle. The German in front of us – a sergeant type – picked up the rifle by the barrel end, swung round and
cracked it down on my head. Fortunately, I had a very good steel helmet on but it was still a very unpleasant introduction to
the German army.
The Germans marched us back up the road and lined us up against a brick wall and a machine gunner lay down facing
us and swept his gun from side to side, checking that he could hit us all in one go. We thought this was the end, and shook
hands with the men next to us. I simply remember feeling very, very sad. But for some reason, they changed their minds
and instead of shooting us, marched us further on down the road. I don’t know what happened next to the others because a few
of us managed to escape by dropping out at the side of the road.
This small group of us spent some time wandering around, trying
to head to Dunkirk, which we thought would be safer. We were taken care of by Corporal Bob Wareham, who was in the Indian army
and a lot more experienced than the rest of us. He knew a few tricks of survival. He used to steal for the rest of us
and showed us how to live off leaves, where to sleep and so on – the sort of things that you have to learn if you are living rough.
We
were finally caught when we tried to steal some eggs from a farm which was occupied by German soldiers. We were put into cattle
trucks – horse boxes that ran on the railway – with other British prisoners, about 40 of us in each wagon. The truck had only
a little ventilation hole right at the top, and we all had to go to the toilet inside it. The Germans only let us out very occasionally
to give us a meal of bread and water. We were in the trucks for weeks, all the way from France to Poland.
When we reachedPoland
we were put into a camp called Szubin. We were allowed to send a card home to our parents to tell them how we were, just by ticking
a box for “I am all right”, “I am wounded” and so on. This was where we first registered as Prisoners of War, so at least we
had some rights under the Geneva Convention. But because we were not officers, we were put to work. People always think
of Colditz and places like that when they think of prisoners of war but Szubin was very different. Colditz was where the officers
were held and the Convention said that they could not be made to work at all. In their camps they even had batmen! Non-commissioned
ranks from sergeant upwards could choose whether to work or not, though often they would because you would get certain perks if you
did. Everyone else had no choice; I was a private so I had to work.
Conditions in the camps were awful but it is the details
that you would not think of that made them so bad. For one thing we were lousy – we had lice infesting all our clothing and
no change of clothing at all. What you stood up in was all you had. If you were lucky and had a pair of under-pants,
they would soon be too filthy to put on. There was no hot water, no heating, no soap or anything. There was never enough
food for all the prisoners. You had stomach trouble all the time and there were those prisoners who were so ill that they died. When that happened we would try to obtain permission to bury them but sometimes this was denied. All these basic decencies were desperately
important to us; and to people that had been brought up decently, it was degrading. You simply had to get on and deal with it,
though. We had no way of getting rid of the filth and lice so we used to say that all the dirt kept us warm!
From Szubin,
I was moved to a camp on the outskirts of the Polish town of Posen. There were about 900 prisoners there and we were set to
farming work, digging land that hadn’t been used for farming before. After the first camp, we thought the conditions were quite
reasonable, though we were still frozen and starving because the camp was very overcrowded.
I remember the first time we got
Red Cross Parcels from Switzerland. We were told that they were coming and what would be in them – milk, corned beef and all
manner of things. We talked about nothing else for days beforehand. When they arrived the Commandant of the camp made
us line up in pairs because, he said, there was only one parcel between two. We didn’t realize then that the Germans
had taken the other half of them! We had also been told to bring a container of some sort as we would need to take the contents
of the parcel away. You weren’t allowed to have tins because they could be made into weapons and you weren’t allowed cardboard
or paper because they could be used to make identity papers and things like that. So the Germans removed all the paper and tin from
the parcel and just poured everything into your one container – soap, condensed milk, tea, beef, all mixed up together. They
did say that they were sorry to do that – but we knew they were really just laughing up their sleeves at us. All we could do was try
to winkle bits out of the mess; obviously you had to eat it because you were going hungry.
It was particularly difficult to get
deliveries through in an occupied country like Poland where the Poles were the enemies of the Germans as well. People in England were
sending cigarettes and clothes but they would disappear on the way and the Germans and the Poles would blame each other for it. Whatever
happened we simply didn’t get them. I remember once I made a “Holy Smoke” out of thin pages of a New Testament I had with me
and some dried raspberry leaves. I never tasted these “cigarettes”- I wasn’t that daft – but I would swap them for things that
I wanted. The only things that we could have were the things that the Germans didn’t want. We never wore under-pants or
proper shoes and socks. Socks in the camp were a square of cloth that you put your foot on diagonally, turned the corners up
and then slid that into wooden clogs. I used to have a Polish cavalry blanket that would have gone over a horse, which was wonderful
because Poland is freezing and we had only one blanket each.
The German guards treated us as though we were not even human to
them. They hit us when they felt like hitting us and threatened us in all sorts of ways. They made it quite clear to us
that if the British won the war, we would not be alive to see it. They would shoot us if we won, and shoot us if we lost. They also told us that they had doctored the food so that if we ever did get home we would never be able to father children. They made sure that the future was bleak to keep us subjected, you see.
In the Colditz stories, everyone seems to be escaping
all the time. It was different for us. We never had any chance at all. The camp was in a Napoleonic castle. It was round with a circular courtyard in the middle and a dry moat all around the outside, so if you wanted to dig a tunnel you’d
have to get down below the moat level at least. The only place to dig from was the courtyard so anyone trying it would be spotted
immediately.
Even if we made it outside the camp, we knew that we would get no help from the local population at all. When
the Germans invaded, the first thing they would do in a town was to round up 10 local people, take them to the town square and shoot
them in front of everyone else as a warning. If anyone tried to do anything to the Germans after that, they would know what
to expect. When the prisoner of war camp was set up, the local people were told that another 10 people would be shot if anyone
in the town lifted a finger to help us. We were told that if we breathed a word of escape then we would be shot. Anyway,
there was nowhere for us to run to. If you look at where Posen is on a map, you will see that we were surrounded by enemies. To the north is the Baltic Sea (controlled by the Germans); to the east is Russia (where Germany had already made great inroads). Occupied Yugoslavia and Austria lay to the south and Germany itself lay to the west.
We had none of the things that we needed
to escape. We had nothing to manufacture false uniforms with or to forge identity papers and so on; we were searched whenever
we left or returned to the camp. It makes sense to me that these things would have to have come from outside the camp. In places
like Colditz, where prisoners of war did escape from, prisoners must have been bribing the German guards with cigarettes for
the goods that they needed. Of course, the Germans would be happy because they could get hold of decent fags rather than the
rubbish they were smoking!
Looking back, I don’t think anyone of us would have been strong enough to escape. The rations
at the camp were one bowl of soup a day plus a fifth of a slice of bread; it was about six inches long and an inch wide. We
were as thin as the people you see in films of the concentration camps. When I got back to England I was barely six stone. There was simply no way to escape at all; so we didn’t even try. You just learned to live day by day and fight to survive.
The
working parties worked six or seven times a week. A lot of our work was replacing gas, electric and water supplies that had
been destroyed by the Poles when the Germans invaded. Often, they would have destroyed all the plans of the towns and cities. The Germans had no records of where the pipes were, so it meant that they had to build their own from scratch. That’s where
we came in. We were ordered to stand in a long line and, in one day, each of us had to dig a trench two metres long by one metre
wide and two metres deep. By the end of the day the Germans would have a continuous newly dug trench. Everyone who worked
was given an extra bowl of soup a day.
I was ill many times during the War but there was no point in saying that you were because
no one took any notice. The important question was could you still work? If you could; you were well. If you couldn’t;
you were not useful any more. Men who couldn’t work were sent to what the Germans called a “hospital” and were never seen again. I had a sprained ankle once and still worked. Another time I nearly cut one of my fingers off and still worked a full day with
a shovel. If anyone in the line was having difficulty; the other men would help them through. The most important thing
was to carry on; to survive. It becomes a way of life. You have to hope that you will get better. If you don’t accept
the conditions, if you don’t carry on hoping then you will die. But – if you manage to live into the next minute: you’ve won!
I
studied German at school – it’s a nice language – and it was useful occasionally when we first got captured, helping the fellows understand
what the Germans wanted them to do. But then one day it got me into serious trouble. We had been sent out in a last minute working
party with no idea of where we were going or what we were going to do. The guards took us to a train that was standing in a
siding; opened the doors and began to throw dead bodies out of the train. I think they were Jews, or they could have been Russians
or gypsies, or any of the other victims of the concentration camps. We were there to bury them. It would have been dreadful
work. They must have been there some time because the smell was appalling. Worse though, were the signs of cannibalism
on some of the bodies. The greater majority of us decided that we would not do it and I was sent to the guards to explain that
we refused to work. So I went up to the officer in charge and said, “We’re not doing this”. He looked at me. “You’re not doing
this?” “Well, no, I’m not doing this, but neither are the others”. He shook his head and pointed at me. “ No”, he said, “I don’t
care about them. Only you. And you’re not doing it”. I ended up in the punishment cells for a fortnight. That was the last time
I offered to translate to a German!
I suppose a punishment cell in a prison camp is about as low as you can ever get. Every
day you would be given a small luxury; a bowl of soup one day, half-an-hour outside the next day and on the 3rd day a straw mattress
to lie on; and so on. This was done to show you what you were missing. The cell I remember most had one big window in
it and if the sentry outside ever saw any part of you through this window, he’d shoot at you. I found out that was true one
day when I got bored – for once the Germans weren’t lying.
We didn’t get much outside news in the camp except for the lies the
Germans told us to keep us down. Some of the prisoners, though, were extremely clever and managed to make simple radios called
crystal sets. They would make sure that everyone in the camp heard the small snippets of information that they received, although
for the first eighteen months we didn’t want to hear it because it was all bad news!
In the three and a half years that I was at the camp in Posen, the only real relief was a letter from Joyce. I clearly remember the first time I heard from her. Stupidly, I failed to salute a German officer and had been thrown in the cells for fourteen days. Whilst I was in the cell, they pushed Joyce’s first letter under the door for me, with a picture of her showing her knees! Cheered me up no end! She simply wrote that my mother had asked her to write to me and she decided that she would, if I didn’t mind. Of course I didn’t! That was the start of correspondence that went on for four years, mainly on her side because I could only send a postcard once a month and a letter every third month. Only some of them got through and they were always checked and censored by the Germans. But we kept it going and by the time we got home I knew I was going to marry her.
When the war started going our way, we had to leave
the camp at Posen and were taken to Klimintov in Czechoslovakia. That was a really smashing place and we were set to work in
a coal mine where the Germans didn’t bother to shore up the roof of the place you were digging under, so the more you dug the more
dangerous it became. We lost quite a few fellows there and we were there for only three weeks.
At that point, the Russians
started their push against Germany. They were coming from Cracow and they were coming fast. The first we knew of it was
the Germans ordered about 200 of us to pack up everything we had – which wasn’t much – and then forced us to march into the Carpathian
mountains, moving away from the Russian advance. The Germans were finally retreating.
The march was hard and many prisoners died on
it. We did not take a direct route but I worked it out later and we probably travelled, through very mountainous country, over
1,000 miles at roughly 10 miles a day. We marched through January, February, and March and into April. The weather was freezing
virtually all of the time and the altitude made it much worse. We had no provisions with us, so every time we reached a village
the German guards would take every bit of food they could find and that was what we survived on. Often they did not find a lot
because the villagers would hide it away when they knew we were coming. We were all seriously ill from marching so far in such
a difficult terrain and eating any bits of rubbish we found just to keep us going. The Germans wanted us to march as fast as
possible and wouldn’t stop for breaks; even to let you go to the toilet. The rule was that if you had to drop out of the column,
you had to be back in line by the time the last prisoners passed by, or you would be shot. Obviously, the more ill you were,
the more you had to drop out, so, when you were at your weakest you had to race to the front of the column before dropping out to
give yourself a chance of making it back in time. Eventually, we heard shots coming from the rear of the column and I realised that
some prisoners had simply decided it was easier not to bother. Men had been driven to that mental point where they preferred
to die rather than carry on.
I don’t know how we kept going but eventually we finished up at a place called Ravensburg, quite
a large town in Germany, near Munich. The Russians were still advancing but we had gone faster than them; so for the first time
in months we were allowed to rest. Then the news came that the Americans were pushing through from the other direction. We were being held in a great big barn and had been set to work repairing the local bomb damaged railway lines. The bombing
was still going on, day and night, so often we could not work. One morning we woke up to find that the guards had left us. We went out of the barn and saw a line of American tanks coming towards us. The front line had passed over our heads in the
middle of the night and we were finally free.
The Americans had no idea who we were or what we were doing there so wanted to
pass us back to the nearest British unit. But we all knew the British Army only too well – if we’d gone to the unit we’d have
been stranded there for weeks! Twenty of us decided to turn back and make our own way home. We had just started to walk
away when we heard a couple of shots and saw two of our friends fall dead, shot by German snipers up in the trees. They had
both survived the prison camps for 5 years and were killed the moment they were free.
We carried on to an American aerodrome
and managed to hitch a lift to Frankfurt and then on to Rheims in France. In Rheims, we were looking around for some transport
to take us further when a jeep pulled up; the British officer in the back asked us if we were prisoners of war. We couldn’t
understand how he had recognised us until he pointed out that we stunk to high heaven, were covered in lice and appeared to be wearing
the same clothes we had been captured in 5 years before! We thought that we looked like any other British soldiers! He still
gave us a lift though and soon we were on a boat to England.
In all, it only took me 7 days from being freed to getting home. I arrived at Birmingham New Street Station on a Sunday and phoned the local public house to ask if someone could run down the road
and tell my parents that I would be home in half an hour. Unfortunately, no one followed up my telephone call so that they had
no idea I was coming back. We had a wonderful reunion and I also met Joyce for the first time. On our first evening out,
we went to the cinema to see “Now Voyager”. The next week we went back to see the picture!
The change from living in the
camps to freedom at home came too quickly for me as I had no time to adjust to it. It was months before I could eat anything
properly. I was still so ill and had become used to such a poor diet. My Mum would cook me food that she thought I would enjoy
just to please me, but I just couldn’t take it in. Everything we take for granted now seemed very strange to me; from having a change
of clothing to being able to wash in hot water and most of all, wearing proper socks and shoes.
Even after the war in Europe
had ended I had to stay in the Army for 8 or 9 months. I had six weeks' leave to recover and then I was sent up to Morpeth in
Northumberland for training in new weaponry that had been developed whilst I was a prisoner. None of us who had been in
the camps was interested in the least! On the first morning, we were woken at some awful hour to the sound of some fellow blowing
away on a trumpet. We looked at each other and said “what the Dickens is this all about?”; and then turned over and went back
to sleep! Of course, the Commanding Officer was furious with us and was all set to court martial the lot of us. There
was nothing he could threaten us with that was even close to being as bad as the camps. We were quite happy to be put in the cells
for disobedience and when we found out that there was only one cell on the base, we even offered to take turns at being locked up. In the end the CO decided that anyone who was interested could be re-trained; everyone else could just forget it. So I did absolutely
nothing up until I left Morpeth.
I was desperate to retire from the Army. I worked for the clerical office during my final weeks
to serve out my time and would spend every weekend at home with my family and Joyce. When I could finally leave, I went back
to a job at the GEC that had been open for me from before the war but that didn’t last very long. I was selling obsolete equipment
and had the sense to realise that the quicker I sold it, the quicker I would become unemployed. So I took another job as a cashier
with the Birmingham Municipal Bank and studied for the student banking exams to become an Associate of the Chartered Institute of
Bankers, which I quickly passed. The bank was taken over by TSB, now Lloyds TSB. I eventually made it to District Manager with
responsibility for twenty branches and nearly 200 staff. I worked there for nearly forty years and finally retired in 1983.
I
married Joyce in June 1947 at the church in Castle Bromwich. When I came home from the war I knew I was going to marry her, although
I’d had another relationship before the war started. Her letters made all the difference to me – she still writes good letters, even
now. We were married fifty years in 1997, so we’re looking forward to our 60th.
I haven’t kept in touch with people from
the camps. You got friendly with the prisoners in your hut but not so friendly that you wanted to see them when it was all over. I have had the opportunity to re-visit Posen but I didn’t want to go. I can imagine people wanting to go back to somewhere they’d
been happy but going back to the camps would bring back a lot of dark thoughts; a lot of fear. If you go into a place you instinctively
sense a certain atmosphere. If you were to go to Belsen then you would get a different sensation because of the things that happened
there; it’s as though the people who were imprisoned there have left a part of themselves there, even though they have gone. There’s something of me still in Posen and it is something of me that I don’t want to know.
Everything about the camps is still
in my head. A couple of years ago, my daughter said that it is a pity I can’t get rid of it all. But it was five years
of my life – it altered me, it affects everything I have done since. I wouldn’t be the person I am if I hadn’t gone through
those years. I find it very difficult to talk about these things even to my family. The only people I can talk to are
people who’ve experienced similar situations and even then it’s still very hard. I’m lucky. I still have a doorway to
these memories that opens occasionally. When it does it always frightens me – I can’t take the risk of what might happen if I leave
it open. So I always try to keep it shut as if I have a barrier around me. No one who wasn’t there can really know what it was
like and how do I tell them. It’s like showing someone a television set. You don’t know how to switch on the sound and
you don’t know how to switch on the picture. You tell them to look at it. But it’s only a television set; there’s simply no
way you can tell them what it can do. For me, I can’t tell people what it was like in totality; only an impression.
I’d
always promised myself that when I’d stopped working and I had the time, I would sit down and write this story. I hoped it would
stop the memories running round in my head. So when I retired I tried to write my memoirs but I couldn’t bring myself to describe
my experiences in the war properly. I wanted to protect Joyce from it. I didn’t want my daughters to see me differently, to
look at me and see someone who’d been in the camps. I really did try to do it justice – sobbed my blooming heart out over it
– but I was too worried what my family would think of me. Joyce read it through and knew I hadn’t managed it. I finished
the book but nothing came of it. The substance is lacking. It’s like a banana skin without the banana. Today, I’ve
done better. I’ve tried to be more honest about it but it still scares me.
In a funny way, I think that I was meant to
go to the camps to experience what I did. When I was first in France, I was told by my Commanding Officer that the War Office was
looking for people with knowledge of German, French and Mathematics to work in the coding departments. So I put my name forward
and the reply said that I would hear in a few days. Then the Germans came through France! Just a few more days and I could
have been one of those people who worked on the Enigma Code. Instead I spent my war in the labour camps and saw and felt things
that anyone who wasn’t there cannot possibly imagine. I can’t help feeling that I have to learn from those years.
It has
affected how I live my life in so many ways. There were so many good people who died there that I feel responsible – not guilty –
but responsible. You cannot appreciate how fortunate you were to make it back, nor how fortunate we are in how we live today.
People complain about petty little things all the time. But I know that I have to turn it round and think, “No, I’m lucky”. I think it is a waste of time getting angry about anything or anybody. If I haven’t come to terms with the mind and its anger
by now then I’ve wasted my time.
Now, when I have any kind of meal, it hurts me to leave anything. In the camps I used
to have a dream about a cream cake factory and my greatest nightmare was when I woke up. I still have that dream occasionally. How can you look at pictures of the poor souls in Belsen and then say that you’re hungry? You’re hungry if you have no food
at all and no prospects of getting any for days or weeks. You’re not hungry if you’re sitting there with a kitchen full of food
– you’re just too blessed idle to get up and get something out of the cupboard! I’ve eaten raw meat. I’ve pushed pigs
out of the way to get at their slops. I am so aware of the great need in the world today that I can’t abide waste. I can’t help
it; not whilst that cream cake factory is still working away inside my head.
I go to church regularly now. I didn’t in the camps. I’d been to Sunday school in my early life but my faith wasn’t strong enough for me to cope whilst I was a prisoner. I’m still coming to the point of knowing what is true. There are people who say that God was not in Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau, Treblinka or any of the concentration camps. I know He was: but I wouldn’t like to argue the point with someone who was there.
Ordinary people are not supposed to understand these things but I can’t help thinking that people who’ve seen more should be able to understand more. It constantly comes to me that I must learn from those five years. If I don’t then I’ve wasted them. The lower you go down – and I’ve been down really low – the higher you can reach up. You have to suffer to do that. Or, if you don’t personally suffer you have to accept that other people suffer and help them, through charity work and so on. If you do that, you’re doing the same thing as I’m doing in trying to learn from my time in the prisoner of war labour camps.
(Reproduced
from One Man's Journey - Appendix - by Howard Powell)